Like a well-known cosmetic advert, this book makes psychotherapy beautiful: a book that proves we are worth it! As in all slogans there is some truth mixed with spin.

The book is divided by diagnosis and most chapters follow a logical format. Why is the condition important? For example, Rosenblatt states that anxiety disorders are ‘one of the most expensive disorders’, accounting for 31% of mental health costs at US$46.6 billion in one year. This makes a compelling argument that mental health desperately needs cost-effectiveness studies. But there is too little on the quality criteria for health economics papers to allow readers to critique the studies effectively.

The methodology is basically a simple search strategy plus literature reviews. Here is where the promise is more than the reality: the authors simply use ‘cost’ as a principal search term and produce lots of studies about the overall costs of disorders with estimates of cost reduction. There are very few studies using established methodologies to assess cost-effectiveness. The best studies are summarised with tables to allow comparisons.

The sting is often in the tail, for example in the conclusions to the anxiety chapter:

Given the book's subtitle, such an inexhaustive approach is disappointing but perhaps inevitable as we know already there are not enough health economics studies to fill a whole book. Nevertheless, this is a good compendium of research and is generally up to date. The discussions have a strong US bias, but unlike many books of this type there is a reasonable coverage of non-American studies. The emphasis on diagnosis, however, limits the book too much, although a good chapter on medical conditions mitigates this.

For anyone trying to convince service commissioners that non-drug treatments are effective this book is invaluable. It argues cogently that psychotherapy can be cost-effective, but that is a big step from saying that it always will be, as cost-effectiveness depends crucially on how a service is delivered.